On-going series:
Crisis
in the Caucasus
- 2008
The Russian / Georgian Conflict and Its Impact on Azerbaijan
Thomas Goltz wrote this article after spending the previous three
weeks in war-battered Georgia and in Azerbaijan. He was in Istanbul
when he penned these observations about Turkey. He had just driven
up the coastal road on the European side of the Bosphorus, from
the entrance of the Golden Horn overlooking the Topkapi Palace
and the Sea of Marmara, to the mouth of the straits on the Black
Sea. The following day, he would be on his way back home to Montana.

. . . . .

September 1, 2008 - Istanbul,
Turkey

Allow me to describe the Turkish
dilemma with the help of a colorful wise saying from Swahili:

"He who rides two donkeys rips his ass."

What I mean by this is that Turkey is so hamstrung with conflicting
interests in the current Georgia-generated NATO/EU-resurgent
Russia conflict that its very geographic, ethnic and economic
centrality to the event has reduced it to almost complete powerlessness,
which is not the way the "wanna-be" regional leader/powerhouse
wants to see itself or be perceived. You might even say that
Turkey is riding five donkeys at once.
Ouch!

On the one hand, Turkey has
been a loyal member of NATO for over 50 years, and presumably
would like to remain so for the next 50 more; indeed, it was
membership in that alliance that specifically provided Turkey
with an umbrella of necessary collective security in the post-WWII
period when the USSR, under Stalin, threatened to reclaim large
swaths of eastern Turkey and neutralize Turkish military control
of the Bosphorus itself, as established under the 1936 Treaty
of Montreaux.

Now, suddenly, it is Russia
that is evoking Montreaux and demanding that Turkey abide by
its terms to keep US and other non-riparian naval forces out
of the Black Sea. Complicating this issue (and arguably in Russia's
favor) has been the American (or more specifically, the Bush
White House) cavalier attitude toward the treaty. When the USA
finally had to do something, even just symbolically, to aid Georgia
in its hour of need, it declared that it was sending in humanitarian
aid, but aboard a US naval ship that exceeded the free navigation,
provisions of Montreaux for military vessels.

These provisions, set in 1936,
defined such things as the total tonnage of warships allowed
into the body of water at any given time (around 72 thousand
tons, I believe), how warships over a certain tonnage must notify
Turkey 15 days in advance of the ship's passage through the Straits
so that Turkey can then can notify other interested parties in
the Black Sea, etc. In 1936, this meant notifying the USSR; in
2008 it means notifying Russia, in real terms.

Background of Turkey and
WWI
(For those on an historical turn of mind, all the arcane provisions
were echoes of the event that dragged the Ottoman Empire into
WWI on the side of Germany against England, France and Czarist
Russia: two German cruisers, the Goeben and Breslau, were fleeing
the English fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and managed to
get to Istanbul/Constantinople and deliver themselves as gifts,
from the Kaiser to the Sultan, where upon they got re-flagged
and had all the officers and crew seconded to the Ottoman Turkish
navy, whereupon they steamed up Bosphorus past and into the Black
Sea to start bombing Russian coastal positions in the Crimea
and elsewhere.)

US Aid to Georgia in Warships
In any case, when the USA announced its aid package to be delivered
to Georgia aboard US navy vessels, it did not bother to consult
the Turks. Not only was this just plain stupid diplomatically,
but also served to further alienate Turkish public opinion (described
by my old friend Semih Idiz in a recent article as "almost
pathologically anti-American"; (See his article: "Turkey's
location, a blessing or a curse?" - Turkish Daily News,
Aug 29, 2008) from backing any sort of US action plan in the
region. Making things worse was the Russian suggestion that the
US ships were possibly carrying more than just bottled water,
blankets and SlimFast noodles to Georgian refugees via the port
of Batumi.

Repercussions to Turkey
The current government of Prime Minister Tayyib Erdogan did eventually
sanction the passage, but not without severe criticism from Russia,
and it came with a price: a massive slow down of Turkish exports
through Russian ports, theoretically, because Turkey, as a country
of origin, was a high risk, and thus subject to a huge inspection
slow-down to check for smuggled goods­even though the $2.5
billion in annual exports from Turkey to Russia (not to speak
of the countries of Central Asia) are very clearly marked goods
such as food stuffs to detergents, white goods (refrigerators,
ovens, etc), textiles and other light industrial stuff.

Turkish labor is another export.
Although it has diminished since the halcyon days of the mid-1990s,
when Turkish construction firms picked up huge orders to build
everything in post-Soviet Russia from military barracks to malls,
this is still an important income generator for giant Turkish
construction firms, who are not afraid to throw around their
political weight in the domestic arena. Turkish manufacturers
began to complain (or whine) almost immediately, and demanded
(or begged) Prime Minister Erdogan to sit down with his good
friend Vladimir Putin and resolve the issue ­ or else.

Or else what?

Russian Tourism ­ These
Days
Kick out or somehow reduce the number of Russian tourists who
now arrive in the country each year for fun & sun? The 2.5
million Ruskian tourists now flopping around on the beaches of
the Turquoise Riviera are not the impoverished suitcase traders,
of the early 1990s, who came to stuff T-shirts and blue jeans
in plastic bags to drag back to Siberia to hawk for a tiny profit,
or the Natasha prostitutes camped in dingy hotels around the
country, no.

The current crowd of Russian
visitors are big-spending folks who are buying million dollar
villas around the Mediterranean city of Antalya or renting rooms
in luxury hotels. Quantifying how much they spend is difficult,
but a recent trip down south suggested that every other chartered
airliner arriving at Antalya's newly expanded international airport
came from somewhere in Russia, and local merchants were starting
to translate the shingles, advertising their services (rental
cars, villas, carpets, restaurant menus, sailboat cruises, etc)
from German into Russian, and no doubt with good reason ­
profit.

Turkey Imports Gas from Russia
But the main reason for Turkish impotence in retaliating, to
Russian economic meddling in its export affairs is much more
obvious than that. And it is in the numbers. Against the $2.5
billion in exports to Russia, Turkey imports some $27.5 billion
annually, and it is not in vodka and black bread, but another
commodity that has become Ankara's Achilles' Heel: gas.

Starting in the 1980s, but rapidly
accelerating in the post-Soviet 1990s and certainly today, Turkey
began signing gas deal after gas deal with Moscow. Initially,
they were off-set deals wherein Turkish construction firms would
build things in exchange for the agreed upon value of the hydro-carbons.
Slowly, but surely, however, friendship, and sweetheart, deals
began to be replaced by ­ gasp! ­ market price,
and Turkey's trade balance with Russia began to grow in the latter's
favor.

The days when Turkish cities
were blighted by sulfur-laden air during winter due to the burning
of cheap coal to heat home and office might have turned into
a distant memory because more than half of all energy produced
in Turkey comes from natural gas. But two-thirds (2/3rds) of
that gas comes from Russia, and now a Russia that has already
proven itself capable of making supply adjustments, when it is
politically expedient to do so, such as the reducing the supply
to western Europe via Ukraine last year, as well as the total
cut off of supply of Russian gas to Georgia on New Year's Eve
of 2003/2004.

BTC at Risk
Europe, too, suffers from the same exact exposure to Russian
energy blackmail. But unlike Europe, Turkey is actually a passive
participant in the process for having harbored dreams of making
itself into a regional energy hub, and securing great profit
by transiting other countries, hydrocarbons to world market.
Despite Russian objections, Turkey was a primary partner in the
construction of first the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) crude oil
line that now feeds Azerbaijani oil to the eastern Mediterranean,
and was also a major backer of the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum line,
that would (and still may) bring Azerbaijani natural gas to European
markets after entering the Turkish pipeline system.

The BTC, along with all other
smaller gauge pipeline and tanker-train systems across Georgia,
were shut down during the so-called Olympics War between Georgia
and Russia, and became the subject of the most intense interest
in Western media and policy circles, out-stripping, it often
seemed, western media and policy interests in the fate of Georgia
itself. "What will happen to the East-West Alternative Energy
Corridor?" many a worried pundit opined.

Well, the BTC has now reportedly
started flowing again, to the great relief of Azerbaijan and
Turkey (as well as Georgia, which also picks up transit fees
from that line). But only with the unspoken permission of Moscow,
which, having proven that the East-West corridor is inherently,
vulnerable, could find a number of different means to shut down
the show-case pipeline any time it wants: Kurdish or Armenian
sabotage, would seem to be the most obvious methods to be used,
although the agile mind could come up with a whole host of alternative,
nefarious methods to interdict contracted flow.

Whether Moscow will ever choose
to do this is open to question, however, because it seems to
be content to allow the Azerbaijanis their oil income (and the
Turks and even Georgians their transit income) so long as they
behave and not try to shoulder in on the real item that Moscow
wants to control, namely gas.

"Gas is Power"
In the words of a new friend in Baku who claims he did not coin
the phrase, "Oil is Money but Gas is Power," and that
is what Moscow wants - power. And all indications are
that that is what Moscow is getting. A few months ago, Gazprom
went to Turkmenistan, which was hopefully going to start committing
its massive gas reserves to a trans-Caspian pipeline route to
Azerbaijan to link in to the BTE line, and wrapped up a contract
at market prices (as opposed to the old discounted purchases)
to buy and then on-sell Turkmen gas via the Russian pipeline
system.

A similar offer was recently
made to Azerbaijan, albeit, before the Georgia crisis. The Azerbaijanis
initially rejected the proposal; now they say that they must
"consider the market." Translation: if Azerbaijan is
not getting sufficient political protection for routing its gas
through Turkey at lesser profit but some perceived political
gain, then it will indeed make most sense to sell into the Russian
system, leaving Turkey in the lurch.

Where else can Turkey get gas,
either for internal use to off-set the lop-sided reliance on
Russian product, or for on-routing to a thirsty Europe? Russia
is already doing some very tidy deals with Egypt, Algeria and
Libya, and so those sources (LNG, in fact, that comes via boat)
are drying up. The last source country in the neighborhood is
the one that the USA consistently tries to block anyone from
doing business with: the Islamic Republic of Iran. But even there,
winter conditions last year led the Iranians to cut back on delivers
of the gas contracted for, creating a mini-energy crisis in Turkey.
Translation of all of the above? Turkey will remain highly dependent
on Russian gas and, thus, be subject to the same or even heavier
levels of Russian political pressures in Georgia and the Black
Sea region for the immediate and mid-term future.

Some folks even say that the
check-mate move is ultimately to "Eurasize Turkey,"
and remove it from NATO and its decades (or centuries)-long yearning
for acceptance into "the West," as personified by membership
in the EU. There is and always has been, I would like to note,
this ideological stream in Turkish politics for almost one hundred
years, variously described or acted upon by the so-called pan-Islamist
and pan-Turkists, movements (or sentiments) that have seen Turkey's
destiny not in or associated with Europe, but with 'The East,'
and often one including an alliance with its traditional foe,
Russia.

What is of greater interest
right now is that this ideological "Eurasianism" has
now been coupled with something much less fuzzy, namely, plain
old-fashioned greed (and attendant corruption).

Name-Calling
As I write these words, the finger-pointing and name-calling
has begun. "Who brought us to this compromised situation?"
is the basic question, with charges being made left and right,
but usually against political actors who are (conveniently) dead
or no longer strutting the Ankara stage.

Among the living, the most immediate
target is former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz, the accolyte
of Turkish Premier and then President Turgut Ozal in the 1980s
and early 1990s, who introduced "the art of the deal"
into the Turkish economy. Yilmaz, who was premier several times
in the mid-1990s, was in power when Turkey negotiated the controversial
"Blue Stream" trans Black Sea gas deal with Moscow,
and famously declared that anyone opposed to the deal was a "traitor."

Now those same detractors, looking
at the bleak economic future of crushing dependence on Russia
gas, are using the same term for him, and talking about investigations
on charges of personal enrichment against the national interest.
But if it starts with Yilmaz in the 1990s (and I do not mean
to imply that it does or that he is guilty; I am merely reporting
the rumblings in the Turkish press, famous for acting on the
adage "throw mud at a wall, and it either sticks or leaves
a mark").

It does not end with Yilmaz.
There have been rumors of corruption - large and small - in Turkish
governing circles for years (as in other governments, I might
add), and even dark whispers of bought and sold agents of influence
in high places who sold out the Turkish body politics for money
or even due to that oldest of espionage tools "kompromat".
(Russian for "information warfare". The word is
shorthand for the compromising materials, which journalists obtain
from commercial interests or security services and then publicize.
The kompromat might be true, or forged, or half true,
but it is always distributed to tarnish someone's reputation
at the behest of a foe).

Who knows? At the very least,
Moscow is using the money tool.

And the economic leverage does
not end with putting Turkey in Moscow's debt. Flush with oil
and gas cash, the giant LUKOIL is now snapping up whole filling-station
chains in Turkey, and expanding its self into the lucrative "down-stream,"
parts of the market. Interesting, LUKOIL and other Russian giants
are also expanding their subtle control of other sectors in Turkey
and Azerbaijan, too. The most interesting was the purchase by
the Russian beer maker Baltika of the French/Azerbaijani national
beer producer Xirdalan (pronounced "khirdalan").

(Let me hasten to say that this
sort of New Russian capitalist activity is not restricted to
the Caucasus or Turkey, but even includes the Norilsk-owned Stillwater
Mine some 40 miles east of my hometown of Livingston, Montana.
Norilsk/Siberia was a slave-labor, nickel, platinum and palladium
mine in the Artic Circle and a KGB cash-cow during Soviet Times.
Its sole strategic-metals rival was the Stillwater until the
collapse of the USSR in 1991. Then Norilsk flooded the market
with its materials, watched the Stillwater price drop from a
hundred bucks a share to around a dollar, and snapped the place
up. Thanks, stock-market.)

Russia is also using several
social pressure points as it plays its cat-and-mouse game with
traditional rival, Turkey.

Turkish ­ Not a Monolithic
State
From the outside, Turkey might look like a monolithic state.
But in many ways, it is an ethnic truly an ethnic mosaic, with
a plethora of agenda-driven, single-issue action groups that
have a surprising impact on government policy.

One group that has been particularly
active (and effective) in Turkish foreign policy circles over
the past 15 years or so are the so-called Circassians (Chekez),
the descendants of those Caucasus Muslims forced into Ottoman
exile by Czarist Russia during its conquest of the North Caucasus
region during the 18th and 19th century (Adagies, Abkhaz, Chechens,
Ingush, Kabardins, Muslim Ossets, etc).

It makes no difference if logic
would suggest that the focus of enmity among the Circassians
should logically be the descendants of Czarist imperial policy,
the New Russians, or even the post-Soviet Russians who committed
such barbarity in Chechnya.

What matters is that the Circassians
have - to an almost exclusive extent - "transferred"
that enmity toward the Georgians, and justify that enmity by
pointing to the ultra-nationalist governments of the early 1990s
that tried to dissolve the autonomous, status enjoyed by their
ethnic kin in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Even northern Cyprus
has gotten involved in the act, and is celebrating the independence
of the two Georgian entities (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) because
the process looks so much like how they obtained their own non-state
status in 1974, following the Turkish invasion to save them from
the Greeks.

The weirdest newsoid I heard
in this regard was that Armenia was considering recognizing
Northern Cyprus, which would thus (theoretically) pave the way
for recognition of its seized state - the Republic of Mountain
Garabagh, better known as Nagorno Karabakh. I forget where I
heard or read this piece of non-news, and dismiss it as an impossibility
for all sorts of reasons, but find it of keen interest that it
got floated at all, and how complex this business of the Age
of the Microstates is rapidly becoming.

And lest I forget, what everyone
is in general agreement about is that that age began in 1999
with the NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo; that Russia
was dead set against it and warned of consequences; and that
no one in the West apparently believed or wanted to take Russia
at its word. Then, after European capitals (and the United States)
announced their intention to recognize Kosovo independence earlier
this year, it was in fact Ankara that got its name into the historical
registrar as actually being the first to recognize.

Caucasus Pact
So, aside from rhetoric, what has Ankara's policy been?
Confusion, stasis, silence until finally, after being accused
of doing nothing, the most ridiculous empty, but dangerous, action
imaginable. On August 18th (or was it the 19th?) Prime Minister
Erdogan flew to Sochi, Russia, to meet with Prime Minister Putin
and announce that as an interested party, he wanted to develop
a regional forum for peace called the Caucasus Stability Pact/Platform,
an entity that would include Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Russia, with the last as the real guarantor of stability in the
region.

Anyone outside the pro-government
press immediately derided this idea as nothing more than mere
theater designed to tell the world (or someone) that Turkey was,
at least, and at last doing SOMETHING, but this was one of those
times when doing nothing, however embarrassing, would have been
better than any other option.

The Georgians have already said
that they will not be part of anything Russia is part of, until
Russia withdraws according to the French Plan [Sarkosy's Six-Point
Cease Fire], and Russia will not have anything to do with any
Georgian government that is headed by Misha Saakashvili.

The newly recognized states
(by Russia) of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will presumably be
included in the Pact, but it is hard to imagine their agreeing
to do so as any sort of entities associated with the Georgian
state they have just officially left. And, if we are dealing
with states and sub-states and micro-states in the region, what
about Karabakh, the secessionist entity in western Azerbaijan,
the Armenian-occupation of which caused Ankara to slap a (rather
porous) economic embargo on Armenia in order to bring Yerevean
to its (economic) senses?

Armenia and the Pact
In fact, there is only one party who has shown any enthusiasm
whatsoever for the said Stability Pact, and that is Armenia,
and for the very good reason that any progress in the pact would
no doubt result in Turkey's lifting its embargo and opening its
border to Yerevan to the great distress of Azerbaijan.

And here comes the weirdest
moment. Although the invitation was issued before the Olympics
War of mid-August, Turkey is currently all abuzz and deeply divided
about what President Abdullah Gul should do with Armenian President
Serge Sargissian's invitation to the Turkish president to attend
a World Cup Qualifying match in Yerevan on September 6th.

This, coupled with the revelation
of semi-secret talks between senior Turkish and Armenian diplomats
in recent months about "normalizing" relations and
even opening the frontier between the two states, has liberal
Turks dreaming of a new era between traditional enemies. And
it sets the teeth of nationalist Turks (and those who have no
time for Erdogan or Gul due to their Islamist-leanings) up in
arms, and expressing ever deeper concerned about the future relations
with "fraternal" Azerbaijan should Ankara lift the
one major pressure point on Armenia that might result in the
return of Azerbaijani land.

"Burn the blanket to kill
the flea," says the Turkish proverb.

The Caucasus continues its slow
seismic shift, while I watch the boats enter the Bosphorus from
my perch above the Black Sea, and wonder where this all goes
from here.

Ah, well!

So today, September 1st (2008), and the first day of the Holy
Month of Ramadan, I made my final preparations for my return
to Montana and my teaching duties at Montana State University,
where I will literally skid in to my new class on the Middle
East, albeit fresh from the Caucasus front of the new "Luke-warm
War," which is not my phrase but about as close to a decent
replacement of "Cold War" as I have found.

My routing back following my
"Summer Vacation" is via Moscow, at 2 AM tonight. Ironically,
it is the only way out of Istanbul to the US in my class of Delta
ticket. I shall send an extra message if the seven-hour lay-over
(or anything on the plane) is of interest.